pressreturn

They used to say that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for an infinite amount of time would come up with something useful, like the entire works of Shakespeare.

This theory could never really be tested until the internet came along. And now, with the advent of WordPress and free hosting, we’ve got millions upon millions of monkeys, hammering daily on their keyboards and pressing the “Publish” button. The ratio of wheat to chaff ain’t too good though – and I certainly have not been reading many of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies at blogspot.com.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some great writers out there doing some great work – I am subscribed to and read a number of blogs pretty much every day. But with the entry barrier guarding the world of nouveau publishing essentially having been taken away, it seems that any old monkey with a keyboard is doing it. Badly.

The reason I’m even writing about this is because I found a bunch of my smoking articles stolen and republished on a few monkeys’ sites. Sure this happens to everyone – but not giving me credit and not even spelling my name right is not fair.

A quick look around the blogosphere kinda confirms that blogs fall into two types. One type has 99% of the market. The other 1% need to shape up their act. Here are some tips for you 1% slackers:

1. If you’re using WordPress, a red squiggly line appears under words when you’ve spelled them incorrectly. Ignore this – correct spelling is so last century.

2. Grammar! Don’t make me laugh. Prepositions were born to end sentences with.

3. Litter your whole damn site with advertisements and affiliate program banners. Make people fight through the flashing “You have won a <insert flavor of the week here>” links to get to the little content you have.

4. In fact, you don’t need content. Just steal it from someone else (see above). Grrr!

5. Choose a totally egregious theme from the available theme downloads. Like purple text on a lime green background.

6. Write about 20 posts a day for the first week, then just stop.

Let’s just see where this ends up. Oh, any by the way, it was originally posted at http://pressreturn.com. So, if you’re not there, you’re on a monkey blog.